


Nighthawks

by strangeallure



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-02
Updated: 2012-09-02
Packaged: 2017-11-13 10:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeallure/pseuds/strangeallure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Agent Farnsworth goes out for a nightly walk, she doesn't expect to meet one of her colleagues. She certainly doesn't expect to keep coming back to the same 24-hour tea place he seems to spend his nights at. Yet, that's what she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nighthawks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalisgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalisgirl/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy the story!

She was different, always had been. She had examined and analyzed and quantified everything around her for as long as she could remember. She always wanted to know why the world worked the way it did, how everything interrelated and came together. She studied and learned, and she understood a lot of things. Always things, though. Never people. There were patterns in people's behavior, it was true. Recurring acts and pieces of information she could use; scientifically and statistically supported facts that allowed her to narrow down data sets, to form subcategories and calculate probabilities. Data points that helped her do her job.

It didn't mean that she understood people, though. Not her colleagues, not her father, not her neighbors. But they didn't seem to understand her either, so maybe it was just as well.

She liked her life; liked having a job and a uniform and a purpose. She was doing a good thing in a world where bad things happened. Still, sometimes, she felt like something was missing. Like there was this ... thing ... shut up deep inside her body, and she just couldn't access it, couldn't find out what or why it was. 

She liked knowing. She didn't like not knowing.

It was worst at night, when there was no job to occupy her thoughts and no routine to help her focus. 

\--

One of those nights, when she had tried reciting the periodic table and prime numbers containing the digit 7 and habitable planets mentioned on _The Adventures of Captain Kirk and His Crew_ in alphabetical order – and when none of it had helped her find sleep, she decided to go out and take a walk. 

Studies proved that it was detrimental to lie awake in bed too long since it increased the likelihood of further episodes of sleeplessness. Light exercise, however, as a brisk walk would provide, had been linked to better sleep. And since she was a Fringe agent with a registered private firearm and extensive combat training, she wasn't afraid of getting mugged either.

She put on a coat and a hat and walked out into the night. Even though there was pollution in the air, too much neon light and too many city noises, she felt more peaceful after a while, less restless. She was contemplating turning around and going back to her apartment when she saw him sitting in the window of a 24-hour tea place.

She stopped in front of the big window pane just as he looked up, and when he recognized her, he smiled. She smiled back and lifted her lower arm a little, wiggling her fingers in a kind of half-wave. He raised his arm, too, and gestured for her to come inside.

\--

"Agent Farnsworth," he said, his mouth and eyes changing with a smile that was quieter than the one she was used to seeing at work. "What brings you here in the middle of the night?" "I could not sleep," she said. "So I went for a walk."

He nodded. "They have a good blend here called _Goodnight Sweetheart_ ," he said, "let me get one for you."

She pondered the offer for a second and then nodded her head once, firmly, and sat down on the opposite side of the table. "Yes," she said, determined. "I will try it."

\--

The tea was good – creamy, with a hint of caramel and cinnamon. First, it warmed the hands she circled around the mug, and when she drank it, the warmth continued to spread all through her body.

“I was cold,” she said with wide eyes. “I hadn’t realized that before.”

He gave a quick laugh. “Good thing you came in then.”

\--

From that day on, whenever it was a clear night without rain or snow or Amber Alerts, she knew what to do when she couldn’t sleep. The walks she took invariably led along the same streets and brought her to the same place; sometime late, when the city was at its quietest. 

He was always there. Always with a smile. Small, but more genuine for it.

He always paid for her tea, too. And even though she periodically tried to settle the bill for the two of them, she couldn’t help thinking that it was a good sign. An indication that he wanted her to come back.

They didn’t talk much, unless they did.

Never about work, though. Which should have been demanding since that was the only subject she was really used to talking about, but most of the time, talking to him was easy. She had known from his file that he had started out as a scientist, but she only ever knew him as a soldier. A Fringe agent in combat boots and with a weapon strapped to his thigh. It turned out that he still read _Science_ and _Nature_ cover-to-cover, that he liked numbers and figures and probabilities, that he understood them like few people she had met – and that he knew _Kirk and His Crew_ almost as well as she did. 

\--

And then her father dies.

\--

She tells no one at work, but they know. It’s in the news. 

He gives her a sad, sympathetic version of his tea shop smile, and it unsettles her to see it at their place of work. She avoids him and doesn’t know what she feels when he lets her.

The funeral makes her uncomfortable, makes her feel like something is wrong, like she is wrong. 

The idea that her father is there and not there. That his body will rot in a box underground, and he won’t even know.

She wants to do and say and take back and make right so many things, but she doesn’t know what they are. They’re all in that place inside her body, the one she can’t access.

\--

She can't really say what makes her go to the other side. 

She knows when she first thought about it, remembers the moment she made the decision, and she can meticulously retrace all the steps and the actions she had to take to get there, but she doesn’t really know why.

Afterwards, though, she is sure that it was a good thing to do, even though it unbalances her for days, even weeks. 

To see the woman who is not her, but who is kind and open and offers her coffee. To interact with the Dr. Bishop who is not Mr. Secretary, who makes her eggs with chives and says that he thinks he loves her and hugs her goodbye. 

That’s the thing that really stays with her. They touch more on the other side. 

She’s not … huggable. She always stands too straight, rigid, with a great amount of tension in every muscle. It’s how she is. It seems distant, reserved, closed off, but on the other side, they’re not deterred as much.

She likes feeling the warmth of another person’s hand around hers, likes that it seeps through the fabric of her clothes when someone holds her by the arm or hugs her like Dr. Bishop did.

It’s a kind of comfort she never knew she’d need, and she certainly wouldn’t know how to ask for.

\--

When she’s back home, she decides she wants her life to be different, at least a little bit.

It’s not easy to change even small things. She likes her routines, likes the comfort and the safety net they provide, but she tells herself to just go at her own pace, and so she does.

\--

When she takes her first nightly walk in weeks, the tension that fills her feels just a little different, just a little new, and when she rounds the corner to where the 24-hour tea place is, she can feel her heartbeat in her throat, can count it out and confirm that it’s accelerating with every step.

When she looks through the window, she lets out a breath, some of the tension in her body fading. He’s there.

When he sees her, he smiles, and when she comes in and sits down on the other side of the table, he says, “I missed you.”

\--

They go back to how things were, talking science and science fiction and drinking tea. She smiles more than she used to, though, strangely eager to show him that she enjoys the time they spend together. He smiles more, too. She knows because she keeps a tally some nights.

\--

After a week, she sits down next to him instead of across the table. He doesn’t comment on it, but when he talks, his body turns towards her, and when their knees bump together, he says, “Sorry,” and laughs, but he still lets it happen two more times that same night.

\--

The night he touches her face for the first time – “You have a little schmutz there. Let me get that for you.” – she makes a new decision, and when he pats her hand before he goes to the restroom and says, “Be right back, Astrid. Don’t go anywhere,” she resolves to put it into action that very night.

\--

It’s two hours and thirty-four minutes until sunrise when he pays for their teas and they go out into the street. They stand there, and his arm starts lifting to do that half-wave thing they always do, but she doesn’t follow like she usually does.

She looks at him and tries to smile, but it comes out crooked. She’s nervous and out of her depth, and she says, “No, Lincoln.”

Belatedly, she realizes that she has never said his name out loud before. 

He looks puzzled, confused, but curious, too. She wants to say the right things, to make him understand what she wants, what she wants to offer him, but she doesn’t know the words.

In the end, she does the only thing she can do. She steps closer and lifts both her arms, and then she hugs him.

For a long moment, his body is tense, maybe more so than her own, but then his arms close around her, and he relaxes into the embrace.

He holds her firmly, but not too tight, like he knows that she always needs a possible escape route, even when she has no intention of leaving. 

They stand there for a long time, her body easing up and her face pressed into his neck. He smells good – of tea and spice and salt, and she can feel his warmth and his heartbeat, which is slowly synching up with hers. It's like something inside her opens. Not all the way, but a little bit. Like a prelude to something new and bright.

When she finally disentangles herself, she moves slowly, like her body doesn’t really want to put distance between them.

“That was nice,” she says, and she feels her cheeks warming.

“Yeah,” he replies, tilting his head and giving her a fond smile. One she hasn’t seen before. “Very nice.” 

She never noticed until now, but his teeth are more like those of a boy than a man, visible spaces between central and lateral incisors and also between the canines and premolars she can see when he smiles so wide. She doesn’t think too many people notice this, and she likes that she does.

“See you tomorrow?” he asks. 

Tomorrow is a Saturday. Unless there’s an emergency – and since their universe started healing, those have become few and far between – neither of them has to work.

“Yes,” she says, “see you tomorrow.”


End file.
